Issue Identification

Start Where the Community Is
The first step in sustainable community engagement is identifying the right issue in partnership with the people most affected by it. Too often, programs are designed around problems that researchers, policymakers, or institutions have defined from their “ivory towers.” This approach can produce initiatives that are technically sound but practically ineffective, particularly for hard-to-reach populations who may have experienced repeated cycles of policies and programs that don’t address their actual needs or reflect their lived realities.

URI Cooperative Extension approaches issue identification as a participatory process. We seek first to listen, drawing on relationships with community members, frontline workers, and trusted local organizations to understand where existing policies and programs are falling short. As Wallerstein, Duran, Oetzel, and Minkler (2018) argue in their foundational work on community-based participatory research (CBPR), interventions are strengthened when they integrate community theories of how problems emerge and change, not just evidence from academic or institutional sources. The Center for Law and Social Policy’s What is Meaningful Community Engagement? documents what this looks like in practice, including specific strategies for building trust, sharing power, and ensuring that community members drive both the identification of problems and the design of solutions.

In practice, this means asking: Who is not being reached? Why? And what do they say they need?

Engaging Stakeholders to Understand the Issue

When URI Cooperative Extension’s Energy Literacy Initiative began exploring barriers to weatherization and energy efficiency program participation among low-income renters, the answer did not come from program data alone. Conversations with community health workers,community-based organizations, and frontline staff in communities like Central Falls revealed that low awareness, distrust of utility programs, language barriers, and the complexity of landlord-tenant arrangements were keeping eligible families from accessing programs designed to help them. This community-level insight directly shaped the design of the Efficient Housing for All (EHA) initiative and the Energy Navigator Training pilot, which connects trusted community-based workers with residents to help them navigate these barriers.

Key Questions for Practitioners:

• Who is missing from current programs or conversations and why?
• What barriers (language, trust, access, complexity) are keeping people from participating?
• Whose voices are most important to center in defining the problem?
• What do community members themselves identify as the issue?

For practical guidance on addressing language barriers specifically, including interpretation and translation planning, see the City of Philadelphia’s Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit.

Approach

Work With, Not For: Building Trust Through Participatory Practice

URI Cooperative Extension’s guiding principle is simple: work with communities, not for them. This idea captures a fundamental reorientation of how institutions typically engage with the public. Rather than delivering solutions to communities through outreach, we work alongside them, learning from their expertise, honoring their priorities, and co-designing approaches that fit their contexts.

This approach is grounded in community-based participatory research (CBPR), a framework that treats community members as full partners in every phase of engagement, from defining the problem to designing interventions to interpreting and acting on what is learned. A CBPR orientation requires genuine shared decision-making and a long-term commitment to building trust, not one-time consultations or token outreach.

Research has shown that hard-to-reach populations – those who have historically had the least access to programs and the greatest need – are often the most skeptical of institutional outreach, with good reason. Many have experienced programs that made promises without delivering or that felt extractive rather than reciprocal. URI Cooperative Extension has learned that sustainable engagement depends on building authentic relationships over time, often through trusted intermediaries like community health workers, neighborhood associations, and local nonprofits who already have the community’s confidence.

The Train-the-Trainer Model

A central tool in our approach is the train-the-trainer (TTT) model, which is often used by universities and non-governmental organizations to deliver cost-effective education to hard-to-reach populations in settings with limited resources. Rather than positioning URI as the sole source of expertise, train-the-trainer programs invest in local community members and frontline workers, equipping them to share knowledge with their own peers and networks. This approach recognizes that social capital from relationships within a community optimizes the learning process, and that local trainers who share the language,culture, and economic realities of their neighbors are often the most credible and effective educators.

URI Cooperative Extension has operated train-the-trainer programs for nearly 50 years.Through the Master Gardener Program, for example, volunteer educators complete a rigorous training and then share evidence-based horticulture knowledge across Rhode Island, amplifying Extension’s reach far beyond what professional staff alone could achieve.

Systems Change Model

Key Principles of Our Approach:

• Center relationships and trust before information delivery
• Co-design with community members rather than designing for them
• Use trusted intermediaries who share the community’s lived experience
• Commit to long-term engagement, not one-time events
• Build in feedback loops so the approach can adapt over time

For a practical framework for designing your own community engagement convenings, see the Rockefeller Foundation’s Convening Design 2022 guide.

For a step-by-step toolkit for planning and facilitating community meetings, including facilitation guides, recruitment strategies, and action planning templates, see the NADTC’s Community Engagement Toolkit.

Partners

No One Has All the Answers: The Power of Cross-Sector Partnership

Effective community engagement requires more than goodwill, it requires the right partners.The challenges facing hard-to-reach populations are almost always interconnected: a family struggling to pay utility bills may also face housing instability, language barriers, and limited access to healthcare. No single organization or sector can address these challenges alone. URI Cooperative Extension’s model deliberately builds partnerships across sectors to combine complementary strengths and reduce duplication. For more on what systems change requires and why cross-sector partnership is central to it, see Systems Change: Why it Matters (and Isn’t Just a Buzzword).

Research on cross-sector collaboration confirms that successful partnerships mobilize resources, expand access to expertise, and build the political support needed to get stuff done. Partnerships work best when roles are clearly defined and each partner contributes something distinct. Institutions that simply convene meetings without genuine role differentiation or shared ownership tend to produce short-lived collaborations rather than durable systems change.

Collaborating to Capitalize on Complementary Expertise

URI Cooperative Extension functions as a trusted convener and technical resource, bringing evidence-based knowledge, facilitation capacity, and credibility across sectors. But we are not the only expert at the table. Community-based organizations bring cultural competency, trusted relationships with residents, and frontline insight. Municipal governments bring policy authority and connections to local systems. State agencies and utilities provide program infrastructure and funding pathways. Each partner’s role is defined so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The Efficient Housing for All initiative offers a concrete example. The Energy Navigator Training pilot brings together URI Cooperative Extension (curriculum design and project leadership), the City of Central Falls (local host community and renter outreach), Children’s Friend (trusted community-based organization and local expert), Rhode Island Energy (utility program access and coordination), the RI Energy Efficiency Council (funding and oversight), and state agencies, including the Office of Energy Resources and the Department of Health (policy alignment). Each partner has a distinct and documented role. This structure allows the pilot to be both locally grounded and state-supported, a combination that research suggests is critical for programs designed for replication.

What We Look for in Partners:

• Complementary strengths and roles (avoid duplication)
• Existing trust with the target community
• Shared commitment to community benefit, not just organizational interest
• Willingness to co-design and share decision-making
• Capacity to sustain the relationship over time

Community Input

What the Community Teaches Us

Effective community engagement requires institutions to be learners, not just teachers. The communities URI Cooperative Extension works with, particularly those that have been historically underserved by public programs, hold deep expertise about their own lives, needs, and the ways that existing systems fail them. Programs that skip the step of genuinely learning from that expertise tend to repeat the same design mistakes, no matter how evidence-based their approaches. URI Cooperative Extension builds structured opportunities to learn from communities before, during, and after program design.

The first thing community engagement teaches us is what we got wrong. Hard-to-reach populations are often disengaged not because they lack interest or information, but because programs have been designed without their input. These programs often use stigmatizing language, require complex applications, or are delivered through channels that aren’t appropriate given the target audience. The community-based participatory research framework formalizes this idea: interventions are only strengthened by bringing together scientific evidence and community theories of how problems emerge and what change looks like in practice.

Learning from the Front Line: Efficient Housing for All Community of Practice

One of the clearest examples of this approach in our work is the 2025 Efficient Housing for All Community of Practice (EHACoP), which is described in greater detail on the Efficient Housing for All page. Before thinking of solutions, we first convened a Community of Practice, bringing together residents, community-based workers, housing advocates, and frontline practitioners to share what they were observing about why income-eligible renters weren’t participating in weatherization programs. What CEELI learned is shaping the design of the forthcoming Energy Navigator Training: the emphasis on relational trust over transactional outreach, the decision to train community-based workers who already have community confidence rather than engaging directly with residents, and the recognition that language (both literal translation and the use of stigmatizing terminology) was a critical barrier.

It is important to recognize that this kind of learning doesn’t end when a program launches. Across our initiatives, we build in feedback loops (evaluations, reflections, stakeholder convenings) so that what communities teach us in one round shapes what we do in the next.

Principles of Gathering Community Input:

• Learning is mutual; community members are teachers, not just students
• Knowledge is tested against lived experience and local context
• Communities of Practice are preferable to one-time trainings, as they create ongoing structures for shared learning
• Engagement should be accessible in language, format, and setting to ensure that you learn from the intended target audience

Interested in facilitating your own Community of Practice? See the Community of Practice Facilitation Guide from the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizations.

Capacity Building

Building Community Capacity That Lasts

The ultimate goal of sustainable community engagement is not to create programs that communities depend on forever, but rather to build community capacity so that communities can advocate for themselves, run their own programs, and continue learning and growing long after an institution’s initial involvement has ended. Capacity building is, therefore, the best measure of whether community engagement has truly worked.

Research on community-based participatory research identifies capacity building as both a process and an outcome. Partnerships build capacity when they equitably share resources, support skills development, transfer knowledge, encourage mutual respect and co-learning, and plan for leadership succession within the community. These conditions do not emerge automatically from good intentions, they require intentional design.

From URI-Led to Community-Led: The Master Gardener Model

The clearest illustration of sustainable capacity building in URI Cooperative Extension’s work is the long-term evolution of the Master Gardener Program. Established in 1977 with a train-the-trainer model, the program has grown to more than 800 active volunteer educators across Rhode Island. But the goal has never been simply to grow the number of URI-affiliated volunteers. It has been to build self-sustaining community capacity around gardening, food access, and environmental stewardship.

Over time, URI has supported communities in transitioning from reliance on URI Master Gardeners to building their own volunteer base within their neighborhoods. URI provides communities with resources to help them identify funding, navigate organizational requirements, and begin running their own community gardens. The role of URI shifts from primary educator and organizer to supporter and technical resource, supporting the development of community ownership and self-determination.

What Capacity Building Looks Like in Practice:

• Building relationships and coalitions that continue to generate collective action
• Transferring knowledge and skills to community members so they can teach others
• Helping communities identify and access their own funding streams
• Transitioning organizational leadership from the institution to the community over time
• Creating tools, curricula, and documentation that outlast any single program or grant